State of the Union

My Administration has a Civil Rights Division that is once again prosecuting civil rights violations and employment discrimination. We finally strengthened our laws to protect against crimes driven by hate.

Once again, a dirty slam at Bush. I'd like to ask him how his administration's dropping the case against the Black Panthers squares with this.

He's really classless.

State of the Union

9:53 PM: Takes bold stand on freezing the Federal budget. [Yay! Reign in spending! ...after printing money for the last year...]

9:55 PM: This freeze will take place next year...after our economy is stronger. [....awkward pause...giggling by Republican side...] [Oh, like, "I'll start that diet next month...after Thanksgiving...]

State of the Union

9:49 PM: Blaming Bush for the deficit. Classy.

And the snide, defiant attitude you get out of a 13-year-old girl while doing it.

So are the Brits trying to make a detour around Prince Charles?

I shouldn't be able to care less, but I have some reluctant interest in how succession works in monarchies. In the early days, succession wasn't a matter purely of inheritance, and you could have several competing claims to the throne. This often resulted in battles and hacking and poisonings and the Norman invasion and such, so eventually, the British and other monarchies started clearer rules for inheriting the title. Less bloodshed that way, but the problem arose that the people who are born in the line of succession are not necessarily born with the talents for ruling. Ahh, the problems inherent in a system of inherited privilege. Aristocracy..."rule by the best" my foot.

In the modern day, the monarch in Western countries does a whole lot of nothing but can be fairly said to be a rallying personality for the nation in times of crisis, at least until the whole Princess Diana mess came about, and the famous British stiff upper lip turned into weepy, pouty, maudlin nonsense. Anyway, you still get the problems from time to time that the next in line for the throne will be a nut and therefore, at the least, an embarrassment. So it is, apparently, with Prince Charles, and therefore we are seeing hints that the royal family is finding ways around him.

I'm a little disappointed, to tell you the truth. I think a King Charles III would provide great entertainment for a long time, not the least to us foreigners.

Global Warming e-mails hacked: a roundup

In the area of politically-sensitive science, the big news this weekend has clearly been the hacking of e-mails from East Anglia University's (UK) Climate Research Unit (CRU). About a decade's worth of e-mails were posted online by the hackers, including e-mails from some of the world's most prominent promoters of the idea of manmade global warming (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW). These men are not only very prominent supporters of this idea, but their data and analyses form the core of much of the understanding of global warming. They're also at the center of the problem with calibrating tree ring measurements to temperature, which erupted a couple of months ago.

The e-mails show some reprehensible behavior for scientists to be caught in: exchanging information about papers they're refereeing, trying to bully a journal's editor, covering up inconvenient data (how to hide a dip in temperatures), and worst--deleting e-mails requested under Britain's Freedom of Information Act.

I'll surely talk more about this later, but for now I want to post a roundup of the major blog posts about this. In no particular order...

Pajamas Media's Charlie Martin
Belmont Club/Pajamas Media's Richard Fernandez
Ace of Spades part 1
Ace of Spades part 2
Andrew Bolt (Australia)
Tim Blair (Australia) part 1
Tim Blair, again
Tim Blair, part the umpteenth (now with swag!) (No, seriously--you can buy your "Hide the decline" T-shirt here!)
Hot Air's Ed Morrissey
Jules Crittenden
Pajamas Media's Charlie Martin (with a detailed list of the interesting e-mails)
Pajamas Media's Ed Driscoll
Ann Althouse on the Washington Post's coverage (it's not bad)--plus, a Thomas a Becket reference!
Roger Pielke
Aaaaand the Washington Post.

The President's address to schoolchildren

I keep seeing this described in the press as an address to "all" public school children. But since the Federal Government can't actually require any school to put this program on, I hope that "all" simply expresses their hope as to who will tune in.

I've read through the Ed. Department's teacher's guide for the address several times (this is the pre-K through 6th grade guide) and am left wondering what this speech will cover. There's a lot about what the President will ask the kids to do and how the kids can help the President.

Maybe it's innocuous: "study hard and go to school." Typical for modern presidents, where our view of his role, sadly, has degenerated into a lot of this sort of thing. But harmless and actually a bit of good for the kids.

But I wonder whether or not this will be where Obama makes his push for community service, which his campaign had said he'd require of all students. The Mrs., who grew up in Communist Eastern Europe, rolled her eyes and said that was what they had to do every school year--two weeks of working out in the fields. You weren't actually required to do that, interestingly enough. You'd just have to repeat the school year if you opted out, that's all...

There's also the problematic phrasing in this teacher's guide:

"Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?"

Ummm...it is not important to listen to any of them! It is important for them to listen to us. We have absolutely no obligation, under any interpretation of our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, other founding documents, writings of the Founding Fathers, or of the whole premise of our system of government, to "listen to" our elected officials (or bureaucrats, for that matter). Our system is predicated on their listening to us, and there is not the converse idea of our needing to listen to them.

We are not wards of the state. We are free men. Our President needs to listen to us, and we go about our lives without needing him to tell us to do things for him. Now, again, if he's just going to tell the kids to study hard, that's fine. It's the advice of any adult to a child. But he gets no special consideration by being President, and he needs to remember that.

America has no Caudillo

I think I'm using that word correctly. Anyway, Foud Ajami at JHU puts Obama's failure to rule by personality into context very nicely here.

A little more on Honduras

From Reuters, which kind of takes the pro-Zelaya line as a given. But it's clear in reporting how Chavez has been acting in this situation, both in public and behind the scenes. Maybe we should be more worried that he's taking a less-public role all of a sudden. It might mean he's got devious plans going on.

In related news, Hillary Clinton has given an interview with the last free television station in Venezuela. She doesn't come out and condemn Chavez but has some subtle criticisms. I wonder if that will accomplish anything or hearten anybody in that country. At least Globovision is happy she talked to them.

Roundup on Honduras

Some of these are a few days old, but I want to archive the links here so I don't have to keep the browser tabs open:
The DC Examiner

Open Market

Donald Sensing

Donald Sensing, again

One of the rare things that will make me visit my Senator

Let me introduce you to Section 304 of the "Cap and Trade" bill (Waxman-Markey).

This will be the law that forces you to make your home much, much more energy efficient. Wait--did you think you owned your house? That how you lived in it was your business? That the kinds of appliances and the windows and the furnace and whatnot were all matters for you, a free man, to decide?

Hah, hah, hah...silly person! No, you, my friend, are a ward of the state and unable to live your own life. Here, let us decide these things for you.

The idea of political class privilege

If constituents threaten to vote against their representative because of that representative's votes in the legislature, that's "terrorism" and shouldn't be allowed (or, if it's free speech, "it's extremely unfair").

Thus sayeth the Speaker of the California Assembly, Karen Bass. Wow, talk about your stereotype of a self-serving politician

Cap and Trade passes the House--but there's no correct copy of the bill!

This just makes me angry. Not only could the lawmakers voting on the awful cap-and-trade bill last night not possibly have read the whole document in the time given, but there is no complete copy of the bill in existence! The 300+ page additions (to the 1000+ page bill itself) that were slipped in at 3:00 AM Friday aren't even simple additions. They're instructions for revising the rest of the bill. Filled with things like,

"Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)..."

Absolutely spitting mad. That's what I am. Deceitful, good-for-nothing centralizers of power at the expense of liberty and the Constitution...and they can't even know what they're voting on....

UPDATE: I'm going to breathe more just to emit more CO₂ for spite.

How to turn Congress into a rubber stamp

Propose that an independent advisory commission propose laws and have the Congress simply vote up-or-down on them. That's what the Obama administration wants Congress to do with some changes to Medicare. Have the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission write the bills and require Congress to vote on them as-is. Of course, even that wouldn't require Congress to approve; they could still vote them down. But it would put Congress on a footing more like the President's veto power.

It would be nice to see this discussed in terms of Fascist political theory--how do you organize government in that system? Where does the real power lie?

Lamar Alexander's proposal on GM ownership

Put the stock certificates in individual taxpayers' names. Interesting. Get it out of the hands of the government and back into private hands. It's certainly better than what's going on now, anyway.

Homosexual marriage vs. the kinship system

This is a thought-provoking article by Sam Schulman on how homosexual marriage would clash with the kinship system. This is not exactly where I come down on the issue; my objection is primarily moral and only secondarily social, while his is mostly social. And I am not entirely sure about the primacy of the kinship system, which he seems to place as the root justification for marriage. Nevertheless, my disagreements are essentially matters of degree, rather than of kind.

Schulman is a master writer and knows how to write a sophisticated and meaningful sentence, without being obscure. This whole article is a joy to read, and on substance, he raises issues I hadn't thought about. It could easily be an article for First Things. I'm going to keep an eye out for his essays in the future.

Did Obama's team make Chrysler shut dealerships of GOP donors?

Lots of blogging being done about this. The dealers who've been closed are overwhelmingly GOP donors.

But one basic statistic that must be found is the percentage of GOP donors among the dealers remaining open. For instance, what if Chrysler car dealers in general tend to be GOP donors? Then having a high percentage of Republicans among those that are closed would be what we'd expect, all other things being equal.

If, on the other hand, the dealers that remain open show a significantly lower percentage of GOP donors, then we ought to start being suspicious. Even at that point, there might be non-political reasons for the discrepancy. Perhaps there's a correlation between dealers that perform poorly and dealers that donate to the GOP. The neighborhoods could have a different economy that affects both, for instance. Though if that were the case, then it would make a nice retort to the "rich Republican" stereotype.

Anyway, thus far, I haven't seen anyone do a look at the control sample, and we ought to withhold judgement until then.

British Parliament scandal: a sentence I wouldn't see in the American version

The British Parliament is going through an expense-account scandal this week. Members of Parliament have been claiming all kinds of things as reimbursable expenses (especially house-related items) , and the public is getting absolutely outraged. Some MP's are claiming that these are within the rules, but if so, the rules themselves are a scandal. Sounds like the House banking scandal back about '92 that helped usher in the Republican majority.

But here's one sentence that I wouldn't expect to find in an American version: "Mr Hogg was forced to stand down by David Cameron, the party leader, after it emerged that he had 'claimed' for the cost of having his moat cleaned because it was listed on the bills for his estate."

Best line on Arlen Specter

Mark Hemingway at NRO's Corner:

I read that he was switching parties, but I was disappointed to learn he's still a Democrat.

Pithy.

Protestors turn on CNN's hack reporter at the Chicago Tea Party

Wow. Very worth watching. I found myself wishing I'd been able to say that to her, myself.

Texas governor reminds everybody that secession is a right

Not saying any of us need to go this far, but it is a right, after all. Amen, brother!